New Products: Sonus, Digital Rapids, Averna/Pace

Sonus Networks has upgraded its session border control (SBC) portfolio with software and hardware enhancements.

Sonus has rolled out two new modular platforms — the SBC 5110 and SBC 5210 Session Border Controllers — that were built on the same hardware architecture and software as the SBC 5100 and SBC 5200 Session Border Controllers.

As part of the product evolution, the SBC 5110 and SBC 5210 feature a modular design that allows customers to install up to four digital signal processor (DSP) cards and is field upgradeable as network demands change.

To go with the new modular platforms, Sonus is also delivering new DSP cards: the DSP20 and DSP25.

These new cards, together with the new platforms, provide an increase in DSP system capacity, giving customers greater support for border-based media control and services.

The Sonus SBC 5110 and SBC 5210 – as well as the DSP20 and DSP25 cards – are available for immediate order and feature a new version of software, which is consistent across the complete Sonus SBC 5000 Series.

The new release 3.1 software delivers nearly 100 feature enhancements across the entire SBC 5000 Series while also extending multimedia features for Unified Communications (UC) needs and expanding security and management capabilities.

“Eighteen months ago, we set out to offer customers the most complete portfolio of session border controllers, and the market has responded by firmly establishing Sonus as the fastest growing brand of SBCs,” said David Tipping, vice president and general manager, SBC Business Unit, Sonus.

Digital Rapids releases new version of Stream software

Digital Rapids recently started shipping version 3.8 of its the Digital Rapids Stream software for the company's StreamZ, StreamZHD and Flux ingest, encoding and streaming offerings.

The new version features H.264, MPEG-2 and DVCPro encoding enhancements including 4K Ultra HD H.264 encoding support; expanded support for automated multi-screen advertising insertion workflows; and new predefined project files for transforming content for Netflix delivery.

Additional new features in version 3.8 included enhanced MXF compatibility with support for uncompressed YUV video; improved MOV file format handling; expanded support for up to 64 audio tracks in Transport Streams; live 5.1-to-stereo and stereo-to-mono audio down-mixing; enhancements to the optional HLS encoding and segmenting module; and a variety of minor additions and refinements.

Stream 3.8 further strengthens Stream software's support for automated, live advertising and monetization workflows with new support for the latest updated SCTE- 104 specification and the HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) protocol. Cueing messages in live input sources are detected to automate the insertion of markers into HLS outputs for triggering subsequent ad insertion or replacement.

"We're excited that the advances in Stream 3.8 are now available to our customers," said Darren Gallipeau, product manager at Digital Rapids. “The encoding performance and quality gains in the new version will bring immediate benefits for most media transformation applications.”

Averna/Pace partner on DOCSIS certification

Montreal-based Averna has forged a design-validation partnership with Pace that it said would accelerate customer premise equipment certification (CPE) for cable operators.

Using Averna’s DOCSIS Channel Emulator (DCE), the two companies will help service providers gain SCTE-40 certification on various CPE equipment for the cable and broadband industry.

The DCE is a smallfootprint channel-emulation platform that helps device makers ensure that their DOCSIS and EuroDOCSIS products deliver optimum performance in the field. The DCE simulates a real-time cable network between the cable-modem termination system (CMTS) and the CPE. The DCE's FPGA-based design is powered by National Instruments' vector signal transceiver, which expands test coverage, lowers latency, extends bandwidth and frequency range, and minimizes the DCE hardware footprint.